On Torture

Image from AntiWar.com.

The picture above is one of the least cruel at the the website. I could not bear to post any of the crueler depictions of the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and have to look at it every time I went to my blog. But I keep in mind that the prisoners are living in the nightmare, and not simply hearing the stories and seeing the pictures.

I've been digesting the long article on torture that was published in the New York Times last week. I printed it so I could read it more than once. Although there's much commentary on the article, I thought I should take note, but I've been putting it off and finding other things to write about, because of a sort of dread.

From the New York Times:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

James Comey seems to have had a conscience, but he's gone. The secret opinions and secret signings have no place in the functioning of our democratic government, although the democratic part of the phrase seems to be disappearing rather quickly as an accurate description.

Congress and the courts have attempted to rein in the Bush maladministration on the treatment of prisoners, but under a veil of secrecy, the shocking maltreatment of prisoners continues. Abu Ghraib is no longer used by the US to house prisoners, but now we have Guantanamo and the "black sites" in unknown countries where torture can be practiced without notice or interference. The US courts have said that the prisoners must be removed from the "black sites", but because of secrecy, we're not sure that the orders of the courts have been followed.

When Alberto Gonzales was appointed Attorney General, I thought, at the time, that there was probably nothing that Bush or Darth Cheney would ask him to do that he would refuse.

The definition of lackey from Merriam-Webster:

1 a : FOOTMAN 2, : SERVANT b : someone who does menial tasks or runs errands for another
2 : a servile follower : TOADY

What do you think? Does the description fit the actions of Gonzales? If he was ordered to do it, he would. He was just following orders.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence

God defend us from the effects of such places of inspiration. And he calls what they've done being "flexible"? Stretching the conscience to the point where it breaks into useless fragments is what I'd call it.

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

The CIA received advice on the hastily conceived program for conducting interrogations from "Egypt and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet intelligence methods...." - all teachers with sterling reputations for conducting interrogations in an ethical manner.

There was frequent questioning back and forth between the interrogators and the Justice Department as to whether this practice or that practice was legal, for the practioners were concerned about having to face consequences for operating outside of the law.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

They're slicing and dicing the policies, questioning what sort of harm can be done by one human being to another human being before a line is crossed into breaking the law. Nothing about what is ethical, what is moral. Just thinking of this sort of conversation taking place is appalling to me, much less considering the consequences that follow for the prisoners and the people who actually execute the practices deemed lawful. Make no mistake: the people who participate in these activities pay a heavy price.

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head planner of the 9/11 attacks, was detained, severe interrogation methods were used against him, which may have the effect of making it impossible to obtain a conviction against him in a court of law.

Occasionally, by bureaucratic slip-up, a person of conscience was hired by the Bush maladministration, but like Mr. Comey and others, they did not stay long.

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

I saw Goldsmith on Stephen Colbert's show, and I remember him saying that the Bush maladministration ran smack up against the law, and he called them on it, but, of course, he was soon gone.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Don't you feel his pain? Doesn't it clutch at your heart that Gonzales was not in the awesome presence as often as before. Adoring, or what?

Words from James Comey in a speech at the NSA headquarters in 2004:

“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”

Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005.

I'm quite sure they were happy to see Mr. Comey go. He seems to have been a fairly consistent thorn in their sides.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.

From Robert Baer in Time:

The CIA is still torturing, according to the New York Times, and the Administration is still denying it. "The government does not torture," Bush said Friday.

So what do you call simulated drownings - waterboarding - and slapping and freezing, techniques that were approved in a 2005 secret Department of Justice legal opinion? If the Eighth Amendment prohibits American police from waterboarding suspects, common sense tells me it's illegal.

But legal or not, the important thing to remember is that torture doesn't work. When I was in the CIA I never came across a country that systematically tortures its citizens and at the same time produces useful intelligence. The objective of torture, invariably, is intimidation.

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of "See No Evil" and, most recently, the novel "Blow the House Down".

For me, the ethical argument carries much greater weight than the practical argument that torture does not produce useful intelligence. The practical argument against torture is simply another example of the stupidity and incompetence that the Bush maladministration demonstrates on a daily basis.

If a country considers itself to be civilized, then torture is not to be tolerated. How did we get into the position in which we argue whether or not torture is the way to go? It's partially because in the upside-down world of Bush and his minions, they declare that torture is not torture, and some are taken in by this deception. And it's the secrecy. We do not know what's going on behind the curtain of secrecy, until long after the dirty deeds are done.

I don't know why I do long posts like this with the quotes and the links. The material is there in the NY Times and the other links, available for reading by anyone who takes the trouble at sites that receive far more visitors than I, but, somehow, I come around to thinking that I need to do them.